74 AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
16,000,000 acres within the ten years next preceding.* Not to 
mention less important crops, this land produced, in the year 
ending on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 288,000,- 
000 bushels of wheat, 17,000,000 bushels of rye, 282,000,000 
bushels of oats, 6,000,000 bushels of pease and beans, 30,000,000 
bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $47,000,000, 
640,000 bushels of cloverseed, 580,000 bushels of other grass 
seed, 13,000 tons of hemp, 27,000,000 pounds of flax, and 
1,730,000 bushels of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were 
familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all 
introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth 
century. 
Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks 
and Romans, or too little employed by them to be of any com- 
mercial importance, the United States produced, in the same 
year, 74,000,000 pounds of rice, 10,000,000 bushels of buck- 
wheat, 3,000,000 bales of cotton,+ 87,000 hogsheads of cane 
sugar, 6,600,000 gallons of cane molasses, 16,000,000 gallons of 
sorghum molasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that 
country within two hundred years, and—with the exception of 
buckwheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton—all, 
directly or indirectly, from the East Indies; besides, from 
* Ninth Census of the United States, 1872, p. 341. By ‘‘ improved” land, 
in the reports on the census of the United States, is meant ‘‘ cleared land used 
for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with or belong- 
ing to a farm.” —Jnstructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census of 1870. 
+ Cotton, though cultivated in Asia from the remotest antiquity, and known 
as arare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used by 
them except as an article of luxury, nor did it enter into their commerce to 
any considerable extent as a regular object of importation. The early voyagers 
found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first colonized 
by the Spaniards ; but it was introduced into the territory of the United States 
by European settlers, and did not become of any importance until after the 
Revolution. Cottonseed was sown in Virginia as early as 1621, but was not 
cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century afterwards. Sea-island 
cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having been 
brought from the Bahamas, where it had been introduced from Anguilla,— 
BicELow, Les Etats-Unis en 1863, p. 370. 
